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The rising number of mergers between companies over the past decades indicates their growing importance on economic behaviour. Nevertheless, their consequences can influence competition and need to be regulated. This work answers to the question on how mergers can impact competition, thus actual and potential competitors, customers, consumers and upstream- or downstream firms. It is investigated how merger control laws and procedures are influenced by economic theories on merger effects. In the end, latest cases are checked for real application of theoretical statements and for authorities’ challenges. To find results, competition laws and control methods of authorities are compared to traditional economic literature and empirical studies on merger effects. A synthetisation of this comparison is made by analysing three up-to-date merger case examples. The results show that the most important impacts result from market power and efficiencies which can influence mainly prices and innovation activities of a market. Depending on specific structural characteristics of each market, methods and outcomes can be different case-by-case. Competition authorities are emphasizing the use of a combination of traditional economic models and flexible analysis methods to decide whether a merger can potentially harm competition and needs to be prohibited. Current cases show the importance of specific market structures and companies’ characteristics on the way decisions are made. Efficiencies and market power effects are weighed up against each other to evaluate mergers. Especially the emergence of new markets represents a challenge for future merger control. The complexity of defining each market’s specific theory of harm is also emphasized. To sum up, merger control nowadays is based mainly on economic approaches and exact merger evaluation methods always depend on specific market conditions.